170: Scaling “Scrappy” and Growing Your Audience

One of the integral questions most marketers face is: How do I expand my audience? Well, you could draw up a new campaign, make a new product—heck, you could even bite the head off a bat; Ozzy Osbourne definitely reached quite a few new people in the 80’s with that stunt. Well, maybe that last one isn’t the best idea for businesses. Anyways, an important aspect is: you have to do something that works with your brand, resonates with the people who want to use your product, and is relatively product agnostic. Now, while they may not be dining on any small nocturnal mammals, Twilio’s marketing efforts certainly capture the aforementioned guidelines, and take on a spirit of boldness and experimentation, all in the service of expanding their audience. In this episode, Sara Varni, CMO of the cloud comms company, discusses how they’ve created marketing that they know their users will like and respond to. It ranges from gamified tutorials, to dev conferences, to sponsored hackathons at client offices and so much more. To learn more about these efforts, and the scrappy, startup-mentality that drives them, tune into this week’s episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite.